The legendary vocalist of Iron Maiden explains to James Quinn how to
juggle rock and aviation – and a new beer.

For a man whose fortune is estimated to be in excess of $100m (£66m), Bruce Dickinson does not need to work, let alone juggle the creation of a new airline and aircraft maintenance business with the demands of a 36-date world tour during which he will play to a combined audience of some 1.5m in 30 different countries.

But then the Iron Maiden frontman is no ordinary millionaire. Sitting with his battered WH Smith desk diary and a 10-year-old Nokia mobile phone in front of him, Dickinson eschews the trappings of wealth in favour of juggling his passion for playing to large audiences with what has become the 54-year-old rocker’s day job.

“The reason I do all the things I do now is because I love them. Life is too short to do the things you don’t love doing,” says Dickinson. “If your only arbiter of anything is money, really you should… go and rob banks.”

Instead, Dickinson has chosen to invest his time and some of his fortune in a Welsh aviation business he hopes could employ as many as 1,000 people in five years’ time.

His investment in Cardiff Aviation – a joint venture with business partner Mario Fulgoni – follows his 20-year life as a charter pilot, in which time he has clocked up more than 7,000 hours of flying.

He traces his love of flying back to relatives who were in the RAF, and the band’s drummer who took him up for a flight having learned to fly in the 1980s, at the height of the band’s popular fame.

“The uncharitable thought did occur to me, if a drummer can learn to fly, anyone can.

“Then, one day on holiday in Florida, I decided to take a trial lesson, for 35 bucks, which shows how long ago it was. And I had what can only be described as a semi-mystical experience, it really was an epiphany.”

Gaining his licence in 1991, he began first with light aircraft, then with twin-engined craft, and then realised the way forward was to fly planes with a turbine engine. After further studying at night school and in his spare time, he began flying the band around. His first job was for British World Airlines, which went bust soon after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, after which he started flying for Icelandic-owned charter airline Astraeus.

Astraeus itself, however, collapsed in November 2011. “I did the very last landing for Astraeus,” he says. “It went bust when I was mid-air between Jeddah and Manchester, flying 220 Hajj pilgrims home for BMI.”

So penniless was the airline that he had to change out of his pilot’s uniform in the toilets of a cafe in Manchester airport, before trying, the following day, to save the business.

After it became clear there was no business to save, Dickinson instead turned his attentions to a Welsh aircraft maintenance business which was on the verge of going under. With Fulgoni, who had been Astraeus’s chief executive until nine months before its collapse, he invested in the plant, a former Ministry of Defence base, three miles from Cardiff airport with a 6,000ft runway and a maintenance facility which was just about to cease operation.

“South Wales is a hub of aviation,” says Dickinson, reeling off the number of other firms located in the region. From a near-standing start six months ago, the business is now employing 60 to 70 people, with wages being paid from profits, which Dickinson is immensely proud of.

“We have, at the moment, one full-time maintenance shift, and as we’ve funded it all ourselves, our costs are nailed to the floor.” Further investment – allowing further maintenance shifts and the creation of more jobs – is likely to come from a venture capitalist, with talks ongoing, he says.

“We’ve identified what I think is a gap in the market, at a time when people are outsourcing in very narrow ways – saying we need to send our aeroplanes thousands of miles away from one place to another place for different types of maintenance and painting.

“We are a one-stop shop,” he says. “The first thing we did was set up a paint facility, as 70pc of the work we get is as a result of people saying 'we need to paint an aircraft’.”

Although repainting charter planes and maintenance is the core business, it is also branching out into painting diggers and other heavy vehicles, as well as setting up a joint venture to work on motorcycle engines.

In addition, the company has recently funded the purchase of a flight simulator, which it is in the process of moving from Bournemouth, and Dickinson estimates he can cut the average cost of pilot training, which stands at around £150,000, by a third. He also has separately invested in an airship company, in which there may be some crossover with the maintenance business.

But what he is really excited about is the fact that Cardiff Aviation is in discussions with the Civil Aviation Authority about setting up an airline.

“Subject to approvals, we’ll be in the air within the next 50 days,” he beams. “Clearly that fits with the maintenance – both operations need each other.”

The plan is to start with three private jets, before sourcing some regional jets, and then working towards some larger, full passenger jets.

“The next stage is rebuilding Astraeus, but with proper governance. The market is ripe for an outsourcing airline that provides extra capacity.

“We want to provide British jobs, British pilots and British-operated aircraft.”

Had Cardiff Aviation had its airline licence, he would have used it to ferry Iron Maiden to its latest tour dates, which began in Bilbao, Spain, last Monday and are dotted around Europe for the next two months, before heading east to the US and Latin America from September onwards.

The tour will also be used to promote the band’s new beer, which Dickinson himself spent six weeks tasting and sampling at Robinsons Brewery in Stockport until he was happy with the flavour.

“It’s going to be in 10,000 pubs next week,” he says, citing JD Wetherspoon, Enterprise Inns and Punch Taverns as pub companies who have signed up to take deliveries. “I had no interest in a limited edition, slap-a-label-on-it beer,” says Dickinson, who estimates that in a fortnight, some 1m pints of the beer – called Trooper after one of the band’s songs – will have been sold. “It’s the fastest beer they’ve ever produced,” he says of Robinsons. “I’m going the blow the doors off the brewery.”

As with everything else he puts his mind to, for Dickinson, there would seem to be no half-measures.